


Barbie's Dream Lair

by kayforpay



Category: Batman (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25794865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayforpay/pseuds/kayforpay
Summary: It was hard not to feel impotent, after her accident. No matter what she did, she would never get her feet back under her, and it felt... Awful.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson
Kudos: 22





	Barbie's Dream Lair

It had been months since her accident. Months since she woke up in a hospital with doctors apologizing to her father. She would never walk again, and any fleeting feeling in her legs was passing at best. She still had so much work left to do, but she was recovering and had to focus on that before she could do anything else. It wasn’t terrible, and she had really worked through the depression that came with her new version of life fairly easily, but she felt… Impotent. Like she had nothing left to offer, not to her father, not to Batman, and not to Nightwing.

Dick never really let her say anything like that, and he certainly never made her feel that way, but she couldn’t help out the way she had before, and it felt awful. Even knowing how important her physical therapy was, she struggled not to want to blow it off and do something. At least run a mugger over with her chair.

On her fourth appointment with her post-release physical therapist, she was struggling with the twinges of pain that flashed through her while stretching, and her phone buzzed in her purse almost incessantly. It wasn’t loud enough to disrupt anything but her train of thought, but the part of her that was still Batgirl told her she had to check and make sure she wasn’t needed somewhere, somehow. The hour-long session crawled on for what felt like days, with her phone buzzing and making her hopeful, and then making her squash the hope down to be realistic. It was probably dad asking if she needed anything from the store again, or one of her friends inviting her to vague plans and then realizing there weren’t ramps at the venue. She had to keep herself in check, because hope wouldn’t help her unless it actually made sense.

After her final round of stretches and muscle exercises, she was almost exhausted enough to accept help back into her chair. It was a pride thing, and her physical therapist told her that it wasn’t anything she should feel weak or less-than about, but she couldn’t allow it. Not if she still at all could. It was too important, keeping just a little bit of herself.

On the elevator down to the parking lot, she finally looked at her phone. Everything was from Dick, but no calls.

_ Hey, Babs.  _ Was the first one. Then,  _ Barbie girl, hey.  _ Followed by,  _ I know you don’t like that nickname, I don’t know why I said it. _

She snickered despite herself at that, the tension left over from her exercise quickly draining. At least he hadn’t changed, no matter what had changed for her. She put her headset in and called him, wheeling herself towards the bus line that took her closest to her apartment.

It only rang once. “Hey! Babs! Are you busy tonight?” Something in his tone made her imagine him hanging upside down from some exercise equipment, and the pounding music in the background took a second to get ticked down to only a dull beat. “Are you doing anything right now?”

“I’m on my way home from PT. What’s up, Dick? I thought you had my schedule written down somewhere.” Either him or Bruce, anyway, but she didn’t say that to him. Comparing him to his adoptive father wasn’t usually something that she was able to do without hurting his feelings, and she understood that, a little bit. “Do you need milk or something?”

There was some vague rattling on Dick’s side of the phone, and he huffed out a sigh before talking. “I don’t have it written down, come on! A little faith that I’m not that weird. And no! I just wanted to hang out with you. I miss you.” He said, his voice going a little softer at the end, like he was almost overcome with emotion, though she guessed that some of that was just embarrassment.

She stopped to wait for the crosswalk, and realized that it really had been a while since she’d seen Dick for any meaningful amount of time. He worked, and she was recovering. And her dad being around all the time made it hard to want to snuggle up on the couch with her boyfriend. It wasn’t on purpose, but guilt bubbled up in her throat anyway.

“I’m sorry, Dick, I didn’t mean to. I’ve just, you know--” She started, and he cut her off.

“No, no! It’s fine, Babs, I just mean, if you’re free, there’s that policeman’s dinner thing happening, so we could watch some movies or something. I just do miss you.” He said, and she could imagine him waving his hands in a stop motion. “I wasn’t trying to make you guilty, I was just saying, I do miss you. And I got Alf’s recipe for scalloped potatoes, so I can make dinner.”

She rolled to a stop next to the bench at the bus stop, and smiled into the air. “Well, you should have led with that! Come over in a couple hours. I need to take a shower and clean up.” Barbara looked at her phone, at the picture of Dick sleeping so deeply she was able to draw on his face with her eyeliner and not have him even twitch that she used for his profile, and leaned back against the low back brace of her chair. “I’ve missed you, too.”

“I’ll be there at six. Be safe, Babs.” He said, and stammered a few syllables before finishing with, “Bye.”

All the way to her stop, Barabara couldn’t help but smile. He loved her, she could tell. Even if he couldn’t seem to say it.

At home, she was faced with different challenges. Taking a shower was different, obviously, but so was just loading the dishwasher to clean up, or vacuuming the living room so it wasn’t obvious she’d been spending so much time on the couch. Everything was different, and she wasn’t surprised, but it was still deeply frustrating. The time between their call and six passed so quickly, and she was still fighting with her coffee table to put it back after only vacuuming half the room when her doorbell rang.

“Hold on!” She was still pushing the table with little aborted rolls of her chair, and groaned when the bell rang again. As she whipped her head to the side to yell at the door, she managed to push the table too hard, knocking a stack of mostly unread magazines to the floor. “Dick, give me a minute!” 

She bent down to pick them up, muttering curses under her breath. As she struggled to reach one of the magazines, some benign fashion rag she used to read but gave up on when the struggles of comfortable fashion for wheelchair users came to light for her, she slipped and barely bit back a scream, catching herself on the table by dropping her stack of magazines and struggling to right herself in her chair. Cursing again, she blinked the frustrated tears from her eyes, and the doorbell rang again.

“Just, Dick, just come in.” She said, not putting as much anger into her words as she wanted to. Her apartment was still messy; not destroyed, but not clean enough for her to feel comfortable. Her father had shown her various wheelchair-friendly vacuums and cleaning tools, and she had ignored them, like that would make it not be an issue. “I’m just cleaning.”

She muttered to herself as she started the process of throwing her magazines back on her coffee table, not even trying to stack them now. Some of them slid over the opposite edge and she groaned, more tears pricking at her eyes. 

Dick walked in, his arms full of food and what looked like DVDs to watch, but stopped short. “Oh, Babs, let me get those.” He set everything down carefully on the table where she dropped her keys when she came inside, and came over to just bend down and pick them up with no issue.

“Stop!” She snapped, pushing at his hands and making him drop the magazines he’d just picked up. “Stop it, let me do it! I can do this, Dick!” Even as she spoke, leaning down to try and grab them, he had to catch her around the waist to keep her from tipping out of her chair. She choked down a sob, but still sounded whiny when she spoke again, her hands on Dick’s shoulders. “Please, I have to be able to at least do this. I can’t do anything else for myself, I have to do  _ this. _ ”

He pushed her gently into her seat, kneeling to look her in the eyes, and held her hands as she finally started crying, for the first time in what felt like a long time. “Babs, you can do so much. You  _ can. _ You’re so strong, and brilliant. You have to do it differently. That’s all, babe. Your dad told me you didn’t want to look at that booklet with the stuff to help you with your chair, but you might have to. You almost fell, Babs.” He held her cheeks in his hands, and used his thumbs to brush away her tears. He looked… Sad. Not pitying, not selfishly ready to talk about how hard it is for  _ him,  _ but sad. “If you got hurt and I couldn’t help again, I don’t know what I’d do. I can’t imagine how hard it is for you, but please. Let me help.”

She sobbed softly, leaning into his hands. “I can’t have you pity me, Dick. I can’t. I know I’m useless, but you can’t pity me. You have to promise, please. Promise you’ll leave me before you pity me.” As she spoke, Dick pulled her into a hug, his hand resting on the back of her head gently and his arms around her so tight it almost hurt. “Promise me you won’t pity me. I can’t stand being pitied, Dick.”

“Barbara, I would never pity you. Never, Babs. You’re the most amazing person I know. Just because you have to live differently than before doesn’t change any of that.” He kissed her cheek, so lightly she might have imagined it if not for feeling his breath on her skin when he continued. “I just want to help you as much as you need. We all need help, but I am not looking down on you. I never could. I would die before I thought you were anything less than amazing.”

Barbara sobbed again, clinging to him and burying her face in his shoulder. Even though she knew that he would say that, even knowing he would never think she was useless, hearing him say so was reassuring beyond belief. She lost track of time crying into his shirt, not sure if it had been days or hours or only a few minutes, but he didn't move a muscle away, even though his knees must have been killing him. Dick shushed her as she started to calm down, and got her shaky permission to move her from her chair to the sofa.

"I'm gonna get dinner started, Babs. And get some water." He said, kissing her forehead.

"Coffee. And something to clean my face, please." She said, clearing her throat to speak more clearly. Dick bowed, like Alfred did when there was company, throwing an arm behind himself and locking his knees. Laughing, she continued, "I said please!"

Dick grinned as he straightened up. "I know, but it made you laugh. I’ll be right back.” He spun on his toes and walked into the kitchen, grabbing their dinner off the table by the door and heading to the oven. 

It was probably just being reheated. Knowing him, he had just doubled one of his prepped meals to bring over, and pre-cooked it before heading over. He never liked to offer food and then have to wait for it, and she really appreciated it. A lot of her cabinets were just too high for her to comfortably reach, so she’d been having pretty light breakfasts, and that was right before her physical therapy appointment. She could only live on takeout for so long, after all.

After a few minutes, he walked back in with a microwaved cup of coffee for her, and she knew before even sipping that it had exactly the right amount of sugar in it, no cream. The washcloth in his other hand was warm and damp, and she sighed softly as she cleaned her face off. It was actually kind of nice to just cry, and tell Dick all her concerns all at once. It wasn’t like she could walk now, or like she didn’t have those concerns, but it was less intense now that everything was on the table. She could breathe and ask for Dick to hand her things, and not feel weirdly guilty about it.

Barbara sipped her coffee, and watched him gather up his tablet and a handful of DVDs, and set her drink aside to make grabby hands at the pile of DVDs. “Let me see. I don’t want to watch  _ Two Fast Two Perilous  _ again. At least not first. Why is your favorite movie a sequel?” She took the discs, flipping that same movie to the back of the stack immediately.

“It’s a prequel, Babs! The story doesn’t even begin without TFTP.” He said, matter-of-fact as though she was very concerned with it. She only glanced over at him, smiling at the other options still tagged from the store he picked them up at. Most were romantic comedies, or slasher films from before super villains were a concern, and one seemed like a nature documentary he saw on the way out of the store and decided to buy on impulse. “Look, anyway, hold on for a minute. I want to show you something I’ve been working on for you. For us, actually.”

She set aside the stack of DVDs, halfway through reading about the “exciting lives of urchins” on the back of one, and looked at his tablet with him. Dick turned to show Barbara the screen more, flipping through a few pages of what looked like blueprints. At the top, the file was saved as “BARBIE’S DREAM LAIR V1”, and when she got a second to really look at it, she snatched the tablet fully out of Dick’s hands to look more closely. They were plans, an elevator with a generator that turned on only if there was a fire, or any other danger, carefully hidden, like it was a Batcave reimagined. A server bank that looked like it would take up a whole room, at least, state of the art screens and hyperprocessors she’d only seen in a handful of future projections from Wayne Enterprises, and more. Like a techie bomb shelter.

“I’ve been putting this together since you got out of the hospital.” Dick said, leaning over to look at his work over her shoulder. “It has the same search power as the Bat-computer, but no stairs. I know you don’t want to move, so I got the layout of all the lower floors here, and there’s a way for you to get to the basement in the elevator without it even being connected to the other apartments. And, look!”

He flipped to the end of the blueprints, and smiled wide as he showed her the final page, the schematics for an advanced two-way radio system that would reach even the furthest points of Gotham’s municipality. She couldn’t help but smile right back at him, though her eyes were threatening to water again.

“You’re a lot better at the technical stuff than me, so I thought you might be up to helping us track people, and get info, from your own little lair.” He said, putting the tablet down in his lap and taking one of her hands in both of his. “But that’s really just one thing you could do that would help. You’re so talented, Babs, you could do anything you wanted to. I just thought this might be good, like, even if it’s just until you find something else.”

Barbara sniffled, laughing softly, and rubbed her eyes. Dick looked terrified for a second, until she laughed more. “It’s perfect, Dick. That looks perfect. I need more hard drive space, but I love the idea. I could be the brains while you’re the brawn.” She pushed her glasses up onto her head to look at him without the water spots, and he kissed her, softly.

“You always have been, Babs. You’re the smartest person I know.” He took one hand away from holding hers, and cupped her cheek, leaning in to rest his forehead against hers. “Sorry I haven’t been around much. I didn’t want to show you anything that wasn’t worth your time, so it took a while. And I was… Scared. I feel guilty.”

She kissed him, this time, and shook her head. “You have nothing to feel guilty about, Dick. And this is amazing. I was just worried you’d be tired of me, or something. I don’t want to hold you b--”

Dick pressed her mouth partially closed with his thumb, shaking his head hard. “Babs, no. You could  _ never  _ hold me back, or slow me down, ever. Never think that. If you ever start feeling that way, talk to me, because you are the love of my life, and I wouldn’t be half as much as I am without you making me better. Okay?” He had released her jaw after only the first word, but she leaned into his hand more while he spoke.

“Okay. I love you, too, Dick.” She mumbled, her voice strained with emotion. Just as she was about to speak again, her oven timer beeped, and she laughed sharply, pushing at his chest a little bit. “Go get that before it burns. I’ll pick a movie.”

He nodded, and stood up, pausing at the doorway for a few long seconds to look at her and stammer, but headed into the kitchen without saying anything. She had edits to make, but this was just the first version of her new lair, anyway. And she had tons of ideas, now that the thought was there. And it helped that Dick thought so much of her, too.

**Author's Note:**

> a commission! this was fun to write tbh


End file.
